Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CEASEVAL (Evaluation of the Common European Asylum System under Pressure and Recommendations for Further Development)

Teaser

Since 2015, migration towards and within Europe has created ‘stress’ for the EU asylum and migration systems, challenging the adequacy of the legal design of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This impacted the implementation of both the CEAS and national asylum...

Summary

Since 2015, migration towards and within Europe has created ‘stress’ for the EU asylum and migration systems, challenging the adequacy of the legal design of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This impacted the implementation of both the CEAS and national asylum systems in practice and called its further harmonisation into question. The notion of harmonisation is not a fixed term, but rather incorporates varied meanings and practices. While in legal terms, harmonisation has been explained as an approximation process towards minimum standards, harmonisation in political terms rather focuses on policy convergence, of which the harmonisation of legal regimes is only one among many mechanisms of convergence. Taking these varied meanings into account, CEASEVAL carries out a comprehensive evaluation of the CEAS in terms of its framework and practice. It makes an analysis of harmonisation which goes beyond the formal institutional setting and takes into account the complex relations among the actors engaged from the local and the national levels, to the European level, in order to explain the success and the failure of coordinated action between these varied actors. Based on empirical research in 12 EU and 4 non-EU countries, it will elaborate new policies by constructing different alternatives of implementing a common European asylum system. On this basis, CEASEVAL will determine which kind of harmonisation (legislative, implementation, etc.) and solidarity is possible and necessary.

Work performed

During the first months of the project, the majority of the conceptual work was done (WP1) which established the theoretical basis and research methodology for the next steps of our research. This effort resulted in several deliverables and the completion of the first milestone – bibliography and database – in M6. At the same time, we prepared the empirical research, consisting of document analysis, discourse analysis, expert interviews, migrant interviews, ethnographic observations and locality studies. Until July (M9), approximately 90% of the envisaged document analysis, around 25% of planned interviews with stakeholders and migrants and about 75% of the quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of media and political debates have been accomplished.
The following steps have been accomplished until M9:
State of Art concerning the conceptual and definitional issues within EU asylum systems and elaboration of the terms “responsibility sharing” and “solidarity” in the CEAS, with a special focus on multilevel governance.
Mapping of the current asylum situation in EU Member States.
Guidelines for empirical fieldwork, interviewer training and case study selection.
Literature analysis and opinion poll analysis concerning the politicization of migration and asylum in Europe.
Baseline study on the access to protection, reception and distribution of asylum seekers and the determination of asylum claims in the EU.
Construction of project website and of content for various audiences.
First versions of data management plan, integrating ethical and data protection issues connected to our work.
Dissemination activities for academia, political stakeholders and the broader public.

Final results

The central ambition of CEASEVAL is to provide tools to all stakeholders with an interest in providing international protection to refugees in Europe and to achieve this goal in ways that ensure the optimal allocation of joint EU and Member States’ public resources. CEASEVAL will maximise the overall impact by providing sound scientific results and empirically tested insights relevant to policy regarding the implementation and effectiveness of the CEAS. The multidisciplinary team of seasoned experts that forms CEASEVAL’s consortium is ideally placed to achieve those impacts. In concrete terms, these impacts are to result from the following project deliveries. We concur that laws, policies, discourses and practices are critical factors shaping migration and asylum systems in the EU. As the Work Programme call emphasises. CEASEVAL will equip policymakers with a range of options to handle the challenges of changing migration and asylum flows and needs.
Therefore the project will target three different groups:
• Policymakers/stakeholders: CEASEVAL will provide evidence of the current impacts of the CEAS and inform policy reforms, while developing management strategies for policymakers to adequately respond to changing circumstances. It will identify challenges and will build up scenarios and solutions. CEASEVAL will also support the policymakers to increase the effectiveness of the implementation of CEAS from a multilevel perspective based on solidarity.
• Academia: CEASEVAL will develop a theoretical framework combining legal, policy, discourse and ethnographic analyses of migration and asylum systems on different scales in Europe. It will enhance the knowledge and understanding of solidarity and harmonisation in the context of CEAS, as well as develop new multidisciplinary methodological approaches.
• Broader public: CEASEVAL will enhance the awareness of public opinion about migration and asylum in Europe, especially in a context of increasing right-wing populism on the one hand and an increasingly welcoming society on the other hand.
These impacts will be achieved through critical assessments of the extensive research background on the EU migration and asylum systems (laws and policies), and using comparative case studies involving discourse and ethnographic analyses of the implementation of migration and asylum systems in selected EU Member States, in relation to their political contexts and existing/proposed EU regulations (e.g. Schengen, relocation schemes).

CEASEVAL moves beyond the State of Art especially by providing a sound theoretical basis for the construction of the CEAS, depicting the varying meanings of “harmonization”, “solidarity” and “responsibility sharing”, as well as on “bordering”, “ordering” and “othering”. Thus, it integrates the two key policies for the current implementation of the CEAS and combines it with key concepts for the European integration process, notably the Schengen System. It moves beyond existing knowledge by implementing a multi-level research frame and by integrating the local level and non-state actors in the analysis. It integrates research on public discourses, taking into account the main agents of politicization and means of communication. And it takes into account the acceleration of policy making and public discourses throughout Europe, as well as the impact of forthcoming elections.
During M1-M9, CEASEVAL worked at all mentioned tasks and will reach the main objectives towards the end of the funding period. The research will 1) provide a new conceptual basis for multi-level governance research, which will also be relevant for other policy fiend than the asylum politics. It will 2) condensate it’s research into scenarios for policy reform for all relevant governance levels, with a special focus on the local level. And it will 3) provide – based on research results on politicization processes – communications guidelines for political and pub

Website & more info

More info: http://www.ceaseval.eu.